CARIAD + Qualcomm

This week CARIAD (VW Group’s SW Company) announced their long-term partnership with Qualcomm. To understand what this partnership actually means, we need to understand what exactly is CARIAD.

CARIAD has 3 main pillars on their website, and they are:

1. Futureproof Hardware: The hardware layer, a toolbox of sorts containing sensors, actuators and computing hardware that can be commonly used among the VW brands. The goal is to improve computing performance using as little of units and wiring as possible.

2. Unified Software: The Volkswagen OS, vw.OS is the platform SW that is on all computing units. With standardized interfaces towards their cloud platform. Planned to be released in 2025

3. Innovative Application: The application layer that performs the final business logic for various functions and services.

The ecosystem approach for Electronics and Software is relatively new in the automotive industry. And to achieve this, given the current and future use cases for vehicles, it would require an unprecedented amount of vertical integration among all the above 3 layers. This new partnership helps fulfill that in the following 3 ways

1. Interchangeability: A key benefit of committing to one SoC product line for all needs is that they can be easily interchanged. Qualcomm has a fairly mature BSP package and porting software to multiple versions of a SoC within a family is not something new for Qualcomm, as they already do in the smartphone world.

2. Platform Continuity: Some time in the future, they would jump to the next generation of SoCs, and the goal is to repurpose as little or even no software to be compatible with the newer version. Think of this as, when a new chip like the M1 processor in all the new apple devices came out, most applications were not optimized to make use of all the new features of the M1 chip. And comparing that to previous chip upgrades in Apple devices(A13 → A14 etc.) all the applications worked as they were supposed to. Sticking to one family of SoCs can help improve the experience both for the customers and developers alike.

3. Ability to affect the roadmap: Being an automotive customer to big chip vendors like Qualcomm or Nvidia has bit of a disadvantage. Since they are essentially competing against other Smartphone customers, who usually have much more leverage on these vendors to affect their roadmap both in terms of features and timeline. But this partnership is something that could address that shortcoming.